How I hate the Lost Cause Myth
As a Texan of vaguely Southern background, the Lost Cause is something I find embarrassing and sorrowful when it crops up, as if it were an inherited disease.
The South way overestimated their military abilities and economic importance (both in the US and abroad). They hoped for quick victory, then hoping for the Brits and French to come in and break the Union blockade that trashed their export economy, and got pwned horribly.
IMNSHO the better guys for the long-term (Union) won the war and lost the peace letting the local aristocracy re-establish economic feudalism in the South with sharecropping, union-busting, and the like making life brutal, deprived misery for those not born rich, white, and well-connected.
Folks that bang on about how tyrannical Lincoln was (armed insurrection is supposed to be answered with hearts and flowers?) and how horrible the Union POW camps were (prisoner exchange was supposed to be a pretty quick deal, but the Union wanted its black troops back as well as white troops which queered the deal. That's why both Union and Southern POW camps became squalid nests of disease, malnutrition, and misery).
They rage at how Sherman's March to the Sea left a burned raped corpse of the Southern economy miss one vital thing- who fired on Ft. Sumter? It wasn't the Union.
The Southern planters and their enablers started it, wanted to keep their privileges, and have a nice gentlemanly war. The Union didn't oblige.
A lot of the Lost Cause folks imagine themselves as Rhett Butler or Scarlett O'Hara, not some sharecropper in debt til they die early and hard or a slave that's been whipped and starved, had their spouse and kids sold away from them.
The poor white freeholders in the Piedmont and Appalachia didn't give a tinker's fart about slavery's "benefits". They were just as liable to get harassed by the local law, have their land seized in corrupt tax/foreclosure auctions, and so forth as blacks.
That didn't mean their racial attitudes were enlightened, they just didn't have any stake in the plantation system and were lukewarm at best about the claims of the planters losing their privileges being some tragedy.
They saw how the Confederate draft was just as corrupt and slanted toward conscripting as many poor white men as possible as the Union's and letting the planters' sons stay home out of harm's way.
They saw how their families were reduced to even more grinding poverty with so many in arms. So, for a great swathe of Southerners aware of their history, there's no nostalgia for the Lost Cause whatsoever.
If the Confederacy won, you'd have a banana republic, economically stratified, intellectually stagnant, oppressive, and backward.
So excuse me if I find the Lost Cause folks infatuated with a toxic fantasy.
I love to war-game underdogs and find a way for them to win, but I have no illusions that a Confederate victory would make me or any other semi-reasonable person a happy panda.